Dah...personally this ole hefer is doin it the old fashioned way. Good old oats in the morning with any old kind of berries or on other days I put lots of cinnamon and good butter.
Drink lots and lots of H2o....ugh.....it took lots of work & even made me nausea dat the truth....ugh!!!!Had to do according to a smart good looking fellow women drooled over by name of Perricone.(Nope I did not drool) it just made sense). Gets the juices a flowin. You drink a full 8 oz.of clear clean water in the morning when you first wake up nothing else & certainly no coffee or soda.
My Grandma Grace taught me oats, and a book called The Fungus Cure and Sugar Blues taught me about sugar.
Lets see, I clean my apples that I get from a good health food store, or farm stand--hate chemicals & steroids(I could write an honest article on truth in advertising about how we fall victims at our local grocery stores and even so called health food stores).
I chomp on any fruit or veggie I want during day and suck the life out of a fig when I get a sweet tooth.
Meat is chock full of steroids no wonder we are so fat-- look at athletes that use them to get pumped up ot how drs. use them to bring swelling down, and get... sorry, there I go.. You can find meats w/out all that, and it is worth it if you are raisin a child.
A meal at nite that is got lots of veggies and stuff I like.
But besides the hardest thing of all is the walk or a bit of exercise everday..
But then again Dean...this is hell, maybe your way is best... getting off of all caffine lost five pounds as Perricone said, and Andrew Weil and Suzanne Sommers. Lost some more following Adkins, saw the Paleo diet and read a few pages and that made a whole lot of sense, oh and Suzzane Somers had a wealth of info about hormones in foods and how they hurt men and women and what sugar did to her husband in raising his chol. to a point of almost having a heart attack. I read Protein Power which alled more carbs. which for goodness sakes should have!I just started pulling my hair out and could have gone broke in the process....
....listened to my inner self and two role models I cherish..
Sorry you get me on this subject & I could go on ...I also found if I just go to the library, gosh, it is so quiet there. Saves me money so I can afford the organic fruits & veggies to not purchase so many books, just my classics! I can get any book I want for free. I mean rent. If it is not in, by golly, the librarian will order it. I am an ole gal and going back to roots is always good. My young children loved the library & learned a bit of respect there because they had to sit still and be quiet. It took a few visits -but then they learned to love going to the the childrens section to find a book THEY LIKED.
dah.....you are right lets sit back & have a beer! I like the art work on this log I think that is also what made me ramble
Maybe there are no more grossly fat people left in Romania, following 45 years of communism and 13 years of whatever happened during its aftermath.
Here, in the land of freedom (to gorge onself) and plenty (of crap upon which to gorge onself), you'd be hard put to find very many people over 35-45 who weigh LESS than 220 lbs. I look at the old photographs of the thin, trim Americans of the 1930s and 1940s, and compare the people in those old black/white prints with their grandchildren today. Incredible; great rolls of fat all over bodies everywhere.
That was almost me too, once upon a time. Last Oct 15, they weighed me at the Group Health Cooperative/Southern Wisconsin clinic in Middleton. Yipes! 215 lbs. Even after six years of mostly daily workouts each morning at a local fitness center. So I began working it down. But slowly.
Early June, three months ago, came crunch time. Blood pressure elevated, LDL cholesterol elevated, HDL sagging, heartburn masquerading as heart attack, the whole catastrophe. They put me on an EKG (echo electrocardiogram?) hookup which enabled hospital staff and me to view all my heart valves in action after completing 20 minutes stress test on a high-sloped treadmill.
"Your heart and associated coronary activities are just fine, Mr Harris. But you need to do a number of things simultaneously. weight loss; low sodium intake; low cholesterol intake; low caffeine intake; low carbohydrates intake; even more physical exercize."
So, on Jun 9, at about 210 lbs, I began a new and rigorous daily life. Sodium, meaning salt, got replaced by NoSalt, meaning potassium chloride, which tastes even saltier at first but which you get used to. Decaf coffee replaced its badass cousin, and less of it at that. No junk food at all. A total caloric budget about 600 cals/day less than my body ordinarily consumes. A full 60 minutes/day walking at 4 mph on the treadmill with a 1% slope. Hydrachlorothiazide for blood pressure; Zocor for cholesterol; aspirin for (blood thinning?).
Now the accumulated fat is rapidly disappearing. I dropped from about 210 lbs in early June to 192 by late July, to about 185 by last weekend. I haven't weighed anything like this in almost 30 years. And I have reason to believe I can lose another 15 lbs or more by the end of the year, and maybe another 15 beyond that by next spring.
Happiness (at least by one definition) is standing in front of a mirror looking at yourself in pants and shirts that are now far too big for you, with belts that need new notches on the small side.
How much does a bowling ball weigh? 15 lbs, maybe? It seems to me that people who are 60 lbs overweight are walking around through life carrying four of these damned things simultaneously. Everywhere you go. Even worse, you're not just carrying them. The fuckers are GROWING on you, each one with miles of blood vessels for your poor old ticker to have to pump lifejuice through them. Talk about lifelong downers! There are few things nastier than growing your own fatsuit.
But isn't that exactly what happens? Looking at my three grown kids and my fourth getting there at 16, it seems to me that people in well-fed societies such as ours start accumulating unneeded weight at about 20-21 years of age. All it takes is weight gain of just one lb per year (10 extra calories per day), and you find yourself weighing an extra 40 lbs when you hit 65 years of age. All aboard the fat train for obesity city!
Outcomes? Take a look around you at who survives and who doesn't and for how long. You don't see many very old fat people. Because obesity is what triggers all kinds of additional health problems which you might get away with as kids, but sure as hell not as a senior citizens.
Well said, Arnold, and congratulations.
I was reasonably fit, but, when I got diagnosed wit h brain cancer in early 1999, the chemo first almost killed me, but, after that, I was too weak to work out , so I sat at home, and ate and got real heavy - 280lbs at 5'7"!!!!
Finally, a couple of months back, tired of dragging all the xtra weight (even though I had managed to bring my weight down to 210lbs), I have begun to watch what I eat, and work out, and I am feeling better already.
Arnold: It's all too easy to look at previous generations and how thin they were. The "true Americans" you spoke of grew up during the Great Depression. Kinds often grew up missing meals. Sweets were not to be had most of the time. Mom might slap you if you got too greedy with what little food was on the table. And most people truly worked for a living--with their hands.
Even as they grew wealthy in the 1950s, they kept to those habits, and were loathe to eat too much, to spend too much on food.
But such notions cannot survive over multiple generations of wealth and prosperity. All Americans, in every racial and demographic group (except the American Indians on reservations and a very, very few people in very remote rural areas) have grown substantially wealthier over the last 55 years. There are virtually no poor people in America by any rational standard. Not only do we all have more income (yes, all of us--this "rich get richer poor get poorer" stuff is total crap, has never been true in my entire lifetime and probably not yours either), but food's done nothing but get cheaper and sweeter and richer, all at the same time, while the number of us who have to work with our hands has dwindled to a small percent of the population. Plus magic boxes in our homes provide us with music, comedy, and entertainment--hell even most of the so-called "poor" in this country have cable TV with a few dozen channels to choose from, and some form of tapedeck or CD player.
I'd also contend that, whatever its tendency to lead us toward sloth, the one thing the WWII generation most wanted for its kids and grandkids is exactly what we have: comfort and security, not wondering where our next meal is or hoping we have enough coal to get through the winter.
As I think recent years have shown, we're still the same people we were, and have given our grandparents much to be proud of. When the greatest health threat facing you is that you've got plenty to eat and don't have to work too hard, that's called prosperity brother. Revel in it, even as you face its challenges.
Sid: I'm happy you beat cancer enough to start working down your bodyfat once again. 210 lbs are a lot easier to haul around that 280 lbs. But 210 is way to much to weigh for 5'7". You probably want to shoot for about 150 or so. Think you can't do that? You already lost 70 lbs to get down to 210, so you're more than halfway home.
Dean: Congratulations on losing those 80 lbs. Seems to me you did this with a little bit of assistance from a surgeon who stapled shut part of your gut, if I remember from one of your 2002 posts about your own body. Even so, 80 lbs of ass-weight is a heavy-duty (!) accomplishment.
Dean: I never said those people in the old black/white photos were the "true" Americans. I did say they were the "thin/trim" Americans. Hell, those folks all looked that way: Bonnie & Clyde Barrow; the WPA workers; the sharecroppers; the folks in line for the soup kitchens; the WWII GIs in training and in combat; their mothers, wives and sweethearts; Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers; Humphrey Bogart; Myrna Loy & the Thin Man.
Come to think of it, I don't recall people getting fat all across this country until the advent of the fast food shitburgers & fries emporiums of the late 1950s. When my elder cousin was a US Marine in the southwest Pacific theater in the early 1940s, they routinely marched these guys 40-50 miles/day up and down mountains near our training camps in New Zealand, which is a mountainous place to begin with.
Today, what do they do? Load everybody into Hueys drop them near the combat zones, or load them into whatever is the modern equivalent of the good old deuce-and-a-half trucks of yesteryear, and drive them on down the road. (Mustn't make our boys cook up a sweat marching on those dusty roads.)
The more I think about it, the more I acquaint that lean and hungry look with virtue itself. Even if looks are deceiving.
By the way, I've lost 45 pounds, following a generally low-carb plan, and more to go.
It's not as extreme as some would have it. I enjoy salads and low-carb veggies. It's more a matter of moderation and portion control. Nothing frightening, I assure you.
Dah...personally this ole hefer is doin it the old fashioned way. Good old oats in the morning with any old kind of berries or on other days I put lots of cinnamon and good butter.
Drink lots and lots of H2o....ugh.....it took lots of work & even made me nausea dat the truth....ugh!!!!Had to do according to a smart good looking fellow women drooled over by name of Perricone.(Nope I did not drool) it just made sense). Gets the juices a flowin. You drink a full 8 oz.of clear clean water in the morning when you first wake up nothing else & certainly no coffee or soda.
My Grandma Grace taught me oats, and a book called The Fungus Cure and Sugar Blues taught me about sugar.
Lets see, I clean my apples that I get from a good health food store, or farm stand--hate chemicals & steroids(I could write an honest article on truth in advertising about how we fall victims at our local grocery stores and even so called health food stores).
I chomp on any fruit or veggie I want during day and suck the life out of a fig when I get a sweet tooth.
Meat is chock full of steroids no wonder we are so fat-- look at athletes that use them to get pumped up ot how drs. use them to bring swelling down, and get... sorry, there I go.. You can find meats w/out all that, and it is worth it if you are raisin a child.
A meal at nite that is got lots of veggies and stuff I like.
But besides the hardest thing of all is the walk or a bit of exercise everday..
But then again Dean...this is hell, maybe your way is best... getting off of all caffine lost five pounds as Perricone said, and Andrew Weil and Suzanne Sommers. Lost some more following Adkins, saw the Paleo diet and read a few pages and that made a whole lot of sense, oh and Suzzane Somers had a wealth of info about hormones in foods and how they hurt men and women and what sugar did to her husband in raising his chol. to a point of almost having a heart attack. I read Protein Power which alled more carbs. which for goodness sakes should have!I just started pulling my hair out and could have gone broke in the process....
....listened to my inner self and two role models I cherish..
Sorry you get me on this subject & I could go on ...I also found if I just go to the library, gosh, it is so quiet there. Saves me money so I can afford the organic fruits & veggies to not purchase so many books, just my classics! I can get any book I want for free. I mean rent. If it is not in, by golly, the librarian will order it. I am an ole gal and going back to roots is always good. My young children loved the library & learned a bit of respect there because they had to sit still and be quiet. It took a few visits -but then they learned to love going to the the childrens section to find a book THEY LIKED.
dah.....you are right lets sit back & have a beer! I like the art work on this log I think that is also what made me ramble
Maybe there are no more grossly fat people left in Romania, following 45 years of communism and 13 years of whatever happened during its aftermath.
Here, in the land of freedom (to gorge onself) and plenty (of crap upon which to gorge onself), you'd be hard put to find very many people over 35-45 who weigh LESS than 220 lbs. I look at the old photographs of the thin, trim Americans of the 1930s and 1940s, and compare the people in those old black/white prints with their grandchildren today. Incredible; great rolls of fat all over bodies everywhere.
That was almost me too, once upon a time. Last Oct 15, they weighed me at the Group Health Cooperative/Southern Wisconsin clinic in Middleton. Yipes! 215 lbs. Even after six years of mostly daily workouts each morning at a local fitness center. So I began working it down. But slowly.
Early June, three months ago, came crunch time. Blood pressure elevated, LDL cholesterol elevated, HDL sagging, heartburn masquerading as heart attack, the whole catastrophe. They put me on an EKG (echo electrocardiogram?) hookup which enabled hospital staff and me to view all my heart valves in action after completing 20 minutes stress test on a high-sloped treadmill.
"Your heart and associated coronary activities are just fine, Mr Harris. But you need to do a number of things simultaneously. weight loss; low sodium intake; low cholesterol intake; low caffeine intake; low carbohydrates intake; even more physical exercize."
So, on Jun 9, at about 210 lbs, I began a new and rigorous daily life. Sodium, meaning salt, got replaced by NoSalt, meaning potassium chloride, which tastes even saltier at first but which you get used to. Decaf coffee replaced its badass cousin, and less of it at that. No junk food at all. A total caloric budget about 600 cals/day less than my body ordinarily consumes. A full 60 minutes/day walking at 4 mph on the treadmill with a 1% slope. Hydrachlorothiazide for blood pressure; Zocor for cholesterol; aspirin for (blood thinning?).
Now the accumulated fat is rapidly disappearing. I dropped from about 210 lbs in early June to 192 by late July, to about 185 by last weekend. I haven't weighed anything like this in almost 30 years. And I have reason to believe I can lose another 15 lbs or more by the end of the year, and maybe another 15 beyond that by next spring.
Happiness (at least by one definition) is standing in front of a mirror looking at yourself in pants and shirts that are now far too big for you, with belts that need new notches on the small side.
How much does a bowling ball weigh? 15 lbs, maybe? It seems to me that people who are 60 lbs overweight are walking around through life carrying four of these damned things simultaneously. Everywhere you go. Even worse, you're not just carrying them. The fuckers are GROWING on you, each one with miles of blood vessels for your poor old ticker to have to pump lifejuice through them. Talk about lifelong downers! There are few things nastier than growing your own fatsuit.
But isn't that exactly what happens? Looking at my three grown kids and my fourth getting there at 16, it seems to me that people in well-fed societies such as ours start accumulating unneeded weight at about 20-21 years of age. All it takes is weight gain of just one lb per year (10 extra calories per day), and you find yourself weighing an extra 40 lbs when you hit 65 years of age. All aboard the fat train for obesity city!
Outcomes? Take a look around you at who survives and who doesn't and for how long. You don't see many very old fat people. Because obesity is what triggers all kinds of additional health problems which you might get away with as kids, but sure as hell not as a senior citizens.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Well said, Arnold, and congratulations.
I was reasonably fit, but, when I got diagnosed wit h brain cancer in early 1999, the chemo first almost killed me, but, after that, I was too weak to work out , so I sat at home, and ate and got real heavy - 280lbs at 5'7"!!!!
Finally, a couple of months back, tired of dragging all the xtra weight (even though I had managed to bring my weight down to 210lbs), I have begun to watch what I eat, and work out, and I am feeling better already.
Arnold: It's all too easy to look at previous generations and how thin they were. The "true Americans" you spoke of grew up during the Great Depression. Kinds often grew up missing meals. Sweets were not to be had most of the time. Mom might slap you if you got too greedy with what little food was on the table. And most people truly worked for a living--with their hands.
Even as they grew wealthy in the 1950s, they kept to those habits, and were loathe to eat too much, to spend too much on food.
But such notions cannot survive over multiple generations of wealth and prosperity. All Americans, in every racial and demographic group (except the American Indians on reservations and a very, very few people in very remote rural areas) have grown substantially wealthier over the last 55 years. There are virtually no poor people in America by any rational standard. Not only do we all have more income (yes, all of us--this "rich get richer poor get poorer" stuff is total crap, has never been true in my entire lifetime and probably not yours either), but food's done nothing but get cheaper and sweeter and richer, all at the same time, while the number of us who have to work with our hands has dwindled to a small percent of the population. Plus magic boxes in our homes provide us with music, comedy, and entertainment--hell even most of the so-called "poor" in this country have cable TV with a few dozen channels to choose from, and some form of tapedeck or CD player.
I'd also contend that, whatever its tendency to lead us toward sloth, the one thing the WWII generation most wanted for its kids and grandkids is exactly what we have: comfort and security, not wondering where our next meal is or hoping we have enough coal to get through the winter.
As I think recent years have shown, we're still the same people we were, and have given our grandparents much to be proud of. When the greatest health threat facing you is that you've got plenty to eat and don't have to work too hard, that's called prosperity brother. Revel in it, even as you face its challenges.
By the way, I've lost 80 pounds this year.
Say "congratulations."
congratulations
Sid: I'm happy you beat cancer enough to start working down your bodyfat once again. 210 lbs are a lot easier to haul around that 280 lbs. But 210 is way to much to weigh for 5'7". You probably want to shoot for about 150 or so. Think you can't do that? You already lost 70 lbs to get down to 210, so you're more than halfway home.
Dean: Congratulations on losing those 80 lbs. Seems to me you did this with a little bit of assistance from a surgeon who stapled shut part of your gut, if I remember from one of your 2002 posts about your own body. Even so, 80 lbs of ass-weight is a heavy-duty (!) accomplishment.
Dean: I never said those people in the old black/white photos were the "true" Americans. I did say they were the "thin/trim" Americans. Hell, those folks all looked that way: Bonnie & Clyde Barrow; the WPA workers; the sharecroppers; the folks in line for the soup kitchens; the WWII GIs in training and in combat; their mothers, wives and sweethearts; Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers; Humphrey Bogart; Myrna Loy & the Thin Man.
Come to think of it, I don't recall people getting fat all across this country until the advent of the fast food shitburgers & fries emporiums of the late 1950s. When my elder cousin was a US Marine in the southwest Pacific theater in the early 1940s, they routinely marched these guys 40-50 miles/day up and down mountains near our training camps in New Zealand, which is a mountainous place to begin with.
Today, what do they do? Load everybody into Hueys drop them near the combat zones, or load them into whatever is the modern equivalent of the good old deuce-and-a-half trucks of yesteryear, and drive them on down the road. (Mustn't make our boys cook up a sweat marching on those dusty roads.)
The more I think about it, the more I acquaint that lean and hungry look with virtue itself. Even if looks are deceiving.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
By the way, I've lost 45 pounds, following a generally low-carb plan, and more to go.
It's not as extreme as some would have it. I enjoy salads and low-carb veggies. It's more a matter of moderation and portion control. Nothing frightening, I assure you.
Bill